Tux Turkel makes several good points in his Oct. 27 Maine Sunday Telegram story, “Energy efficiency remains the improbable dream.” He’s right, Maine’s older homes are more difficult to make energy efficient than the newer housing stock built west of the Mississippi.

However, he also makes two common errors the Maine Climate Council can avoid:

First, old houses already hold substantial embodied energy and stored carbon, so it is not as critical to meet the strict standards intended for new homes.

Second, he is also right that the home repair industry suffers from scaling problems not experienced in other industries like suburban tract housing. There are few technological fixes that can be easily and universally applied where every home is different.

What Turkel fails to understand, however, is the approach supported by advocates of the Green New Deal. Investing in the kind of context-specific education required for Maine’s unique housing, environmental and labor conditions could not only put our state’s new residents to work quickly, but that investment will spill over into other sectors of local economies in which energy is a primary variable. In other words, all of them!

Steven A. Moore

Diamond Cove

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